In my early days of designing and building websites, MS Frontpage was the tool of choice. It was easy, flexible, created code in a somewhat compliant format, and....it was cheap! Then along came Dreamweaver and the process of developing attractive and functional web pages became a whole lot easier, at least after the initial learning curve was completed.

Nowadays I barely touch Dreamweaver, it's an expensive relic of the past, brought out for occasional hard-coding tasks which invariably involve creating a code snippet for inserting into a Joomla or Wordpress website.

When I made the transition from Dreamweaver to Joomla it wasn't without its challenges and setbacks. Creating an optimal file path with SEO friendly URL's and filenames was and still is a challenge in Joomla, made easier by the use of 3rd party plugins, but a challenge nevertheless.

After a year or so mastering Joomla, and with 25 or so websites under my belt, I began to embrace the power and flexibility of Wordpress. When I made my first Wordpress versus Joomla evaluation, around 2008 or so, Joomla had the upper-hand when it came to eCommerce functionality. Wordpress, despite a growing base of custom plugins, couldn't really compete with the type of eCommerce applications on offer for Joomla users. Components like Virtuemart shopping cart made eCommerce for Joomla a breeze, and can sill be downloaded freely from Virtuemart dot net.

But wind the clock forward a couple of years and the playing field has leveled out. Wordpress can now be utilized to create a conventional website and not just a blogging site, complete with integrated eCommerce components/widgets and all of the commerce related bells and whistles which were once much harder to find.

So which is best, Wordpress or Joomla?

It really boils down to the end application. What exactly do you have planned for your website and how do you intend to make money from it?

For sites which are content rich and require a good structured system for organizing articles and pages, I'd tend to lean towards Joomla CMS. For sites with more of a 'social' bent - blogging and providing a base to interact with visitors, I'd lean towards Wordpress.

However, it's easier to get Wordpress to fulfill both of the above roles than it is Joomla. Joomla has various modules and components to emulate WP blogging features, but none are really as good as Wordpress itself. Wheras Wordpress can be customized to provide most of what Joomla brings to content organization, with a little bit of extra effort. It's also a little easier than Joomla for the novice to master, in my opinion. Joomla does come with a steeper learning curve, whereas Wordpress can be driven to the races without opening the users handbook.

So for many people the decision comes down to a slightly more arbitrary factor, one of SEO. Or put another way - which site has the best opportunity for ranking well in Google, a site built with Joomla or a site built with Wordpress?

The 'stuff' which is spun on various webmaster forums about this subject never ceases to amaze me. You have people who've only ever used Wordpress, or only ever used Joomla, claiming to be experts with both platforms, and obviously they always assert that their chosen path is the best to follow.

So for James and Arlene and the visitors to their fine website, I wanted to take a slightly more scientific look at the differences between the two platforms, at least as far as SEO is concerned, and hopefull help you with some basic configuration setting to maximize your SEO.

The following is a listing of the different functions and features of each platform with respect to SEO, to see how each compares with the other, and to offer a performance grade based on my extensive experience with each platform.

URL/ File name formatting -

Most people know by now that Google and other search engines consider keywords in URL's towards SERP's. This extends beyond the actual domain name into actual filenames. Keywords in the domain name are more useful than keywords in the file paths and filenames, but it's worth taking the effort to name your files and sub-directories to reflect the keywords targeted by the content.

So how do they compare?
Both Wordpress and Joomla can be setup for optimized URL's without plugins.

Joomla uses 'sections' and 'categories' to organize content and the section name and category name are used by Joomla in the URL. With Joomla, it's actually quite difficult to create a full file path without the page appearing to be in a subdirectory. If you organize your content into categories and sections, as Joomla inherently drives you to do, and you link to the content from menu items, then Joomla will show the category/section name as sub-directories in the URL path. Since Google gives more prominence to pages in the root directory than pages which are one or two steps down from the root, this is a slight drawback for using Joomla for good SEO. Using the Joomla system of content management, you're going to have only your index page in the root directory with all other content placed in sub-directories. There are workarounds for this but they're not easy to implement without resorting to SEO plugins or 'components'.

Wordpress uses Permalinks as its system of managing the URL structure. The full file path including sub-directories, can be created from variables such as date and time, or from fixed values such as categories and tags. But which permalink settings work best? This is what the WP Codex says on the subject -

“For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.”

If you read the above, then do a Google search on “Best permalink settings for SEO” you'll see that a lot of so-called SEO gurus contradict the advice from the WP Codex. Many suggest a custom setting for the permalink structure which looks like so /category/post-name/ That would certainly result in a URL with a more conventional structure, one that we're used to seeing pre CMS days. But it would be in direct conflict with what Wordpress are telling us to do.

The best way (IMHO and through extensive research) is to use a permalink structure that does not start with a text based variable, as recommended in the Codex. Here's a list of variables you can use that are not text based:

%year% – The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004

%monthnum% – Month of the year, for example 05

%day% – Day of the month, for example 28

%hour% – Hour of the day, for example 15

%minute% – Minute of the hour, for example 43

%second% – Second of the minute, for example 33

%post_id% – The unique ID # of the post, for example 423

Remember, you just need to make sure the first variable is not text based, like “/%year%/%postname

Now what about the file extension? You'll notice that for most of the settings, your posts won't have a file extension, they won't end in '.php' or '.html', you'll merely see the trailing slash, like /

Probably 95% of Wordpress sites don't show a file extension, and it certainly isn't required from a functional standpoint. But Google SEO leader Matt Cutts recommends using extensions to help Google differentiate between different types of content. So here's a custom permalink structure which suits all conditions and it's the one I generally use for new Wordpress sites -

/%year%/%category%/%postname%.html

So to provide a score for Wordpress versus Joomla when it comes to URL formatting -
Out of the box, without using plugins -
Wordpress 4
Joomla 3

Ease of initial configuring of the SEO settings -
Joomla – From within the Joomla admin panel you can navigate to 'Global Configuration' and see the settings labeled “SEO Settings”. It's easy to change all three check boxes to “Yes” under SEO Settings (as they should be) but depending on your web server configuration, it may not work. On some apache installations when you select the the 3 SEO parameters to 'yes' in global config, you'll need to manually login to your Cpanel or FTP and change htaccess.txt to .htaccess. This is made clear in the config but newbies may have trouble working with the htaccess files particularly as some programs class them as system files and you may need to change your file permissions to see the file.

Wordpress - setting the Permalinks is easy enough but there's a LOT of conflicting information over which settings are best for SEO. WP doesn't make a recommendation inside the Admin, so you'll need to either just use one of the default options (not recommended) or use the recommendation I've made in the “ URL/ File name formatting” section above.

Score -
Wordpress 3
Joomla 4

Meta Tags (Title)
Joomla is fairly intuitive in that the page title will appear as the Meta title tag on all pages with the exception of the Home page. Then it becomes a newbie nightmare trying to find out how to set the home page Meta Title tag. You'll need to research it the first time, the key is within the menu default landing page setting, which is not at all intuitive.
Wordpress - pretty straightforward to set the page title tag, which is the actual title you've created for the page. But what if you want to use all 70 characters in the Meta Title tag? - it means you're going to have a long and ugly page file name. Also, the Title will appear at the top of every page above the content block, so unless you manually remove it from the theme page.php you're stuck with it.
Joomla 4
Wordpress 1

Meta Tags (description)
Joomla - simple to set the description tag on any page from with the page/content edit screen.
Wordpress - You can't set the Meta description Tag without a plugin. You can handball code into the header.php but it will be static from page to page. Not good.

Joomla 5
Wordpress 0

Meta Tags (Keywords)
Joomla - Easy to set on a page per page basis
Wordpress - You can't set the Meta keywords Tag without a plugin. You can handball code into the header.php but it will be static from page to page. Not good. Some say you don't even need a keywords tag, but some SE's still seem to use it.

Joomla 5
Wordpress 0

Heading Tags (H1, H2 etc)
(These are important for on-page SEO)
Easy enough in both. For Joomla I'd recommend you go to 'admin' > 'plugins' - 'TinyMCE' and click 'Extended'. This isn't installing a new plugin it's merely adding more features to the existing plugin and it will give you more page formatting options. With extended options enabled you can now highlight text on the page and set it as H1, H2 or whatever. As of V3.2.1 of WP, you'll need to manually install and configure TinyMCE plugin to see and extended set of page/post formatting options.

Joomla 4

Wordpress 3

Alt Image tags allow you to enter comments (an area where you can include keywords) so that when a web surfer hovers their mouse over an image, the browser displays the content of the Alt Tag. These are easy enough to use in Joomla and Wordpress.

So, which CMS platform is best for SEO?

With an out-of-the-box approach my vote goes to Joomla for SEO.

In my experience Joomla installations can work just fine without an SEO plugin, in fact I rarely use one unless I'm converting an old HTML site to Joomla and need to match the file structure.

Wordpress absolutely needs a Plugin, at which point the playing field is more level.

Another consideration is that I find myself doing more code-hacks when I'm working with WP than with Joomla. One of the first things I always do when setting up a Wordpress blog is to remove the Title tag from the top of the page, so you can add your own title in a <h1>Title Here</H1> format. The way to do this is to FTP to your server and navigate to

www/wp-content/themes/YOUR-THEME/page.php then look for and remove this code -

<?php the_title(); ?>

Hopefully that will help you get the most out of which ever CMS platform you choose to commit your effort to. Both platforms are excellent, you just need to know a few basics to get the most from them.